Chapter Text
EPISODE 1 - AVAST ME HEARTIES
HARRY GOODSIR: hello! I’m Dr. Goodsir!
SILNA GOODSIR: and I’m also Dr. Goodsir...is that the opening we’re going with? Are we going to stick with that?
HARRY: I like it, I think it’s fun.
SILNA: I like it too, I just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page. We should probably cut this.
[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
SILNA: Anyway. I’m Silna, that’s Harry, and this is Quacks: Old Medicine for the Modern Age.
HARRY: that was very smooth, good job!
SILNA: thank you very much.
HARRY: should we...explain who we are so our listeners don’t think we’re two random people giving outdated medical advice?
SILNA: that would probably be smart, yes. Well, I’m a general physician, so I am actually qualified to give out medical advice.
HARRY: and I’m a medical historian, and biologist, though my background is in anatomy.
SILNA: he has two and a half PhDs and a lot of interests.
HARRY: there’s a lot in the world to be interested in! Anyway, this is going to be a medical history podcast. Each episode I’ll introduce a strange medical practice or case and Silna is going to tell you why it’s absolute hogwash and how to actually take care of yourself.
SILNA: speaking of which, If you’re listening to this podcast and you can’t remember the last time you washed your hands, you are legally obligated to pause and wash them before you can press play.
HARRY: so we’re going to be talking about scurvy today.
SILNA: that was a jarring subject change.
HARRY: I wasn’t sure how to bring it up.
SILNA: you tried. Tell me about scurvy.
HARRY: before I get into the finer details, you need to know that during the Age of Sail it was commonly accepted that half of the sailors on any given ship would die of scurvy.
SILNA: oh my god. Just eat an orange.
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THE JAMES AND DUNDY CAST - EPISODE 271
HENRY THOMAS DUNDAS LE VESCONTE: what do you want to recommend this week? What should people put in their earholes?
JAMES FITZJAMES: I will pay you to never say earholes again.
DUNDY: I make no promises. Anyway my recommendation is-
JAMES: I thought it was my turn!
DUNDY: you took too long. Anyway, my podcast recommendation for this week is Spirits which is a boozy mythology podcast.
JAMES: interesting...
DUNDY: there's quite an extensive back catalogue for your listening pleasure, and you don't need to listen in order to enjoy. It's very fun, I like the episode on sharks in particular.
JAMES: but- sharks are real.
DUNDY: are they?
JAMES: yes! Sharks are quantifiably real!
DUNDY: guess you'll just have to listen to the episode to get your answers then. What are you recommending?
JAMES: there’s a podcast that’s just getting started called Quacks and yes I am friends with one of the hosts so I’m biased, but honestly? It’s fantastic. It’s a medical history podcast and even if you don’t like medicine or history I can almost guarantee you’ll still enjoy it. At the moment there are only three episodes but that means you'll have time to really camp out and say that you were there from the beginning.
DUNDY: do you enjoy it, as someone who's nearly died more times than he can count?
JAMES: it makes me feel better about myself, yes.
DUNDY: if they do an episode on malaria you should ask to guest star since you...you know.
JAMES: nearly died of malaria?
DUNDY: yes.
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EPISODE 5 - TOOTH HURTY
HARRY: imagine being a regular 19th-century Pennsylvanian living next to this man who has recently started running around his yard like a rabid dog and hitting his head against the ground. I fear I'd assume the worst. Then you see him again a week later and he tells you that oh he’s feeling much better now, all it took was his tooth exploding in his mouth. How....how do you even react to that?
SILNA: how do you start that conversation? I mean, I don’t know how close houses in 19th century Pennsylvania were, but I assume that they’d be fairly close, and that the sound of the tooth exploding would have been quite loud. Just go up to your neighbour all ‘hey Jeff’- wait what was his name?
HARRY: The Reverend ‘DA’ is all we have
SILNA: ‘hello Reverend, you’ve, uh, been acting a little strange as of late, and I heard...a gunshot or something that sounded like one coming from your house the other day. Are you alright?' and he looks you dead in the eye and says 'yeah, my tooth exploded but I'm fine now'.
HARRY: and that wasn't even the only case of exploding teeth!
SILNA: excuse me?
HARRY: there were three more cases around the same time and area, but it hasn't happened since the 1920s. There still isn't an agreed-upon explanation for why it was happening.
SILNA: I think that if I learned that my neighbour went berserk before his tooth blew up in his mouth….I think I'd move. I'd pack up and leave. No more exploding teeth for me.
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Harry D.S. Goodsir @GoodsirPhD
Me, lightly touching Tuunbaq with the side of my foot: Tuunbaq move out of the way please so I don’t trip on you
Tuunbaq, his eyes enormous: you KICK Tuunbaq? You kick his body like the football? Oh! Oh! Jail for pàpà! Jail for pàpà for One Thousand Years!!!!
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EPISODE 17 - KNIFE TO MEET YOU
HARRY: up until his death, Cummings would complain of stomach cramps, vomiting, and general pain while sitting or standing. His party trick was killing him —
SILNA: you don't say.
HARRY: at least one doctor didn't believe him when he said he swallowed knives. And, while believing your patients is a good baseline, I can understand a little skepticism in this case. John Cummings died in March of 1809. He was extremely emaciated and had been discharged from the Navy two years prior, being unfit for duty. In the end, he swallowed thirty-five knives. Do you want to guess what they found during the necropsy?
SILNA: I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was knives.
HARRY: it was, in fact, thirty to forty knife fragments.
SILNA: No wonder you were getting stomach pains, you fool!
HARRY: a spring from one of them was piercing his colon.
SILNA: oh my god.
HARRY: the image of cutting open someone’s body and finding it filled with corroded knives is...horrifying.
SILNA: the answer to the question “how many knives can you swallow?” should never be “all the knives on the ship”.
HARRY: the answer should be “none because swallowing knives is incredibly dangerous and also not smart”.
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i have glass bones & paper skin @jartnell
started listening to @quackspod and now i can’t stop saying imagine! before telling literally anyone anything|
i have glass bones & paper skin @jartnell
“I got 8 hours of sleep last night, imagine!” “there was a wiener dog in a tutu on the train, imagine!” “doctors used to prescribe cigarettes as an asthma treatment, I M A G I N E”|
Quacks Podcast! @quackspod
@jartnell this is exactly the type of fan response we dreamed of (also please say you took pictures of the wiener dog in a tutu)|
i have glass bones & paper skin @jartnell
@quackspod I DID[image description: a chubby brown dachshund in a bright yellow tutu snoozing on a train seat]
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EPISODE 25 - THE RABIES THING
SILNA: it's a very special episode today! Not only are we 25 episodes in which, thank you for sticking with us, but it's also our first listener request episode.
HARRY: we're shaking things up a little bit this time. Today, Silna will be the one introducing a case and I'll listen on in despair.
SILNA: this email showed up in our inbox immediately after we recorded last week's episode and, since reading it, I have not known peace. Every moment of my life, waking or sleeping has been devoted to thinking about this email.
HARRY: for the record, I know nothing about this and have not seen the original email. Silna forwarded it to herself then deleted it from the Quacks inbox so I could never see it.
SILNA: it's topical! It's current! It's absolutely, and I do not say this lightly, hog-wild. Thank you so much, listener Hodge, for sending this gem, titled 'the rabies thing'.
HARRY: oh dear. What, pray tell, is 'the rabies thing'?
SILNA: well, you see, teens on Tumblr are really into rabies at the moment. It's the hot new meme. Only, for some users, it isn't just a meme
HARRY: [softly] no.
SILNA: people are trying to get rabies. That's the rabies thing.
HARRY: why!
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RACHEL CARSON, MARY OLIVER, AND OTHER INSPIRATIONS FOR ASPIRING ENVIRONMENTALISTS
By Harry Goodsir
I was 14 the summer I discovered Rachel Carson. A temperate, damp Edinburgh summer that rendered me ill for most of it — too many days spent out in the rain, against my mother’s better judgement — and left my days open for monotony. That previous April I picked up a copy of Carson’s The Sea Around Us at a charity shop but had not yet cracked the spine. It was a 1951 first edition, appropriately waterlogged and adored, faded pencil annotations wrapping around Carson’s prose, filling in the gaps. It had been raining for two days, and I’d been trapped in bed for three when I finally flipped open the cover and read that immortal opening line “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea.” After two more pages, I knew I was a goner.
Read full article →
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EPISODE 38 - BURN BABY (HEART)BURN
HARRY: we’ve amassed quite a lot of iTunes reviews. More than I expected in all honesty.
SILNA: we expected, like, three maximum. Three reviews and two of them are telling us we’re annoying.
HARRY: instead there are...15….16! 16 reviews! And most of them are nice.
SILNA: except for “Chas” who used their iTunes review to call me a slur and say that our voices are annoying.
HARRY: go to hell, Chas.
SILNA: anyway, Kit says “Quacks invented the concept of podcasting” which is very sweet, they also want to know “where the spinoff podcast about mollusks and sea slugs is”.
HARRY: that's very kind of you to say but please don’t tempt me with a sea slug podcast. It'd be way too self-indulgent. Uh, this review from Henry says “I really enjoy this podcast but accidentally fell asleep listening to your episode on the plague but my phone kept playing so I woke up halfway through the tapeworm episode and had very upsetting dreams for a week”.
SILNA: Henry I am so sorry.
HARRY: if it makes you feel better, Henry, I also had upsetting dreams for a week after researching tapeworms, so we’re even.
SILNA: we also get a lot of reviews from actual doctors - both varieties - which is fun. Most of the time they’re very kind but we did get one from a Dr. Stanley. Do you want to read it?
HARRY: I think you should have the honour.
SILNA: ahem, “while the information presented is factually sound, it is delivered in a format so marred by over-planned jokes and bits that the medical history is nearly unintelligible”. Doctor Stanley, I take offence to the implication that I plan my jokes in advance. They are 100% on the fly and that's why they’re terrible.
HARRY: the next part of this review is my favourite: “on occasion, the show will take a sharp nosedive into overwhelming sentimentality to the point where it feels like the listener is being held captive at an overlong wedding reception”.
SILNA: oof.
HARRY: has anyone ever invited you to a wedding, Dr. Stanley?
SILNA: get him!
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Silna “nearly unintelligible” Goodsir @GoodsirMD
A TRUE TRAGEDY that this review was posted AFTER we recorded the last episode and didn’t get to read it live on air. Thank you, DJ, for the ONLY testimonial I am ever going to use:
[Image description: a five star iTunes review by DJ reading ‘A DELIGHT! - I wasn't sure this would be my thing but Quacks is a goddamn delight and also an unexpected bisexual thirst trap.]
Quacks Podcast!
@quackspod
Medical history retold by @GoodsirPhD & @GoodsirMD. “Nearly unintelligible” and prone to “overwhelming sentimentality”. “An unexpected bisexual thirst trap”. Updates Thursdays.
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EPISODE 41 - VACCINES: ALL THEY'RE QUACKED UP TO BE!
SILNA: hey, hey white people. Yeah, you white people listening to this podcast right now. I'm going to get real close to the mic right now because I have something important to say. I'm getting reeeally close like I'm right there in your ear, like I live in your brain. It'll be like ASMR. You like that, right? Okay. [lips on mic] vaccinate your children!
HARRY: please vaccinate your children. It makes the world a safer place and you won't lose your three-year-old to scarlet fever.
SILNA: [lips still on mic] vaccines do not, I repeat do not cause autism and even if they did there's nothing wrong with being autistic.
HARRY: if you'd rather have a dead child than an autistic child, you are a despicable human being.
SILNA: vaccines also will not make your children gay or trans.
HARRY: Again if you refuse to vaccine your kids because you're scared they're going to end up anything other than straight and cis, then you're horrible and shouldn't have children.
SILNA: if you think that crystals or energy or other homeopathic medicine can fight polio then….I'm sorry but you're wrong.
HARRY: the only, I repeat only, thing that will prevent you from getting polio is the vaccine against polio.
SILNA: you can still have your crystals and your natural medicine as long as you also vaccinate your kids. But please believe me when I say…what's a crystal? Give me the name of a crystal, please.
HARRY: Malachite.
SILNA: excellent, thank you. The malachite pendant you got from Etsy will not do anything to prevent your kids from dying of easily preventable diseases. Congratulations, little Johnny's died of consumption.
HARRY: poor little Johnny. Although, I don’t think the people who are refusing to vaccinate their kids are naming them things like ‘Johnny’ now. They’re all naming their kids ‘MacKayleigh’ now.
SILNA: right, of course. I’d better get with the times. Hello, I am an anti-vaxxer and these are my three children: Jaxxton, Kale, & War Crimes.
HARRY: oh my god. Do you know what my favourite anti-vax argument is?
SILNA: tell me?
HARRY: when people say that, historically, we've survived without vaccines. Do you know what happened when people contracted cholera during epidemics? They died. Oh "we survived whooping cough before vaccines", actually, thousands of people didn't. Diseases like typhoid and meningitis were death sentences to countless people throughout history, and continue to be so today across the world. It is our duty as historians and practitioners of medicine to help as many people as we can. And, it is our duty as human beings to keep each other safe. History does not move backwards; science does not move backwards. It is irresponsible and selfish to avoid vaccinating your children or yourself against easily preventable diseases you think you can beat through positive thought. Disease does not care about who you are, and being anti-vax puts everyone around you at risk. It is disrespectful to the memory of everyone who died of a disease that you, in your lifetime, will hopefully never have to spare a second thought for, to risk infection. Easily preventable does not mean easily treatable.
SILNA: that was extraordinary. Did you write that beforehand?
HARRY: I did not, I just really needed to let listeners know where I stand on the matter.
SILNA: well, now they obviously do.
HARRY: I hate that line of thinking so much.
SILNA: me too. I hate the hubris ingrained into it. [conservative old person voice] kids today are too soft, grow up and die of typhus like the rest of us!
HARRY: [similar voice] you millennials with your avocado toast and your vaccines, back in my day we just died!
SILNA: contracting encephalitis to own the libs. [Pause, clamouring in the background, paws on wood] Tuunbaq, do you have anything to say to our listeners about vaccines?
TUUNBAQ: [hisses, whines]
HARRY: you heard it here folks. Vaccines are Tuunbaq-approved.
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17 PODCASTS FOR WHEN YOU'RE DISILLUSIONED WITH HUMANITY
#11: Quacks: Old Medicine for the Modern Age
What? A medical historian and a general physician discuss strange medical practices throughout history (and some from the present day)
When? Every Thursday
How long? About 45 minutes
Co-hosted by Drs. Silna and Harry Goodsir (she has an MD, he has ‘two and a half’ PhDs); Quacks is a fun and educational romp through medical history and the weird ways people have treated everything from exploding teeth to gout. They also tackle more modern topics such as the anti-vax movement (it’s bad) and the weird trend of Tumblr kids being obsessed with rabies (it’s odd). While remaining mostly comedic in tone, it does occasionally take on more serious topics with stunning clarity and empathy - Harry’s filibuster speech about human responsibility and the legacy of epidemics in episode 41 is just one example. Available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Twitter: @quackspod
Website: quackspodcast.com
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EPISODE 53 - MUMMY IN MY TUMMY
HARRY: we have gotten a staggering amount of requests for today's topic and I've avoided mentioning what it is because I want to get your genuine reaction on record. It is truly concerning how many people have asked me to talk about this. Are you ready?
SILNA: what I am is scared.
HARRY: before we start we actually have some housekeeping to do!
SILNA: you're really going to leave me hanging like that.
HARRY: first of all, if you've made fanart for the show we've seen it. It's probably been printed out and put on our fridge.
SILNA: we might have to get another fridge so we have more space for fanart.
HARRY: second, we've heard your call for merch and by the time this episode goes up it will be answered. You can get stickers with our logo, or name tags that say 'I am also Dr. Goodsir', there are some prints, I won't reveal what they're of so there's a little surprise for you.
SILNA: there are little 'imagine!' pins. We have matching ones, it's all very cute and also a little sickening.
HARRY: depending on how well the merch does, we want to try to donate at least half of the profits to a different charity each month. This month we're partnering with Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami which is a great Canadian charity concerned with bettering the lives of Inuit populations, specifically with getting their voices and needs recognized at a federal level. We'll be leaving a link to their website in the show notes as well as on Twitter. The merch designs are by our good friend Graham Gore who did our beautiful logo, if you want to check out more of his work we'll include a link to that as well.
SILNA: like Harry said, the money is going to be split mainly between Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and Graham, we'll be keeping maybe 5% of the sales and that's for Tuunbaq's expensive diet food.
HARRY: I forgot to mention where you can find the store, it's at quackspodcast.com/merch once more that is quackspodcast.com/merch. Now that that's out of the way, did you know Victorians used to eat mummies to cure things like headaches and dizziness?
[coughing, laughing. A thud close to the microphone. Tuunbaq howls in the background.]
HARRY: listeners…she's down. Silna is down. She's got her face on the desk. I think I broke her.
SILNA: [wheeze, unintelligible]
HARRY: do you need a minute?
SILNA: [unintelligible]
HARRY: she needs a minute.
SILNA: at the end of the episode I'm going to be properly outraged by the desecration of graves but that delivery was honestly the funniest thing I've heard in my life. Tell me about mummy-eating.
[...]
SILNA: did they….do you think they snorted it?
HARRY: almost definitely.
SILNA: [cackles, unintelligible] hang on hang on. [bad English accent] hello doctor, I've been having some pains in my head and I've tried cocaine, I've tried opium, I've injected so much heroin into my bloodstream that I thought I could shoot crows out of my hands. Is there anything else you could recommend? [old timey radio announcer voice, equally bad] well I'm pleased to report that there's a hot new medicinal trend sweeping the nation. It's mummies. That's right! You know King Tut? Nefertiti? The Plagues of Egypt ringing any bells? Remember how England couldn't be satisfied by invading nearly every country in the world and needed to resort to digging up graves and pillaging tombs to quench their imperialist thirst? Well, now you too can experience Egyptomania and medicinal cannibalism right in your very own home! Try our new mummy supplements to cure nausea, dizziness, headaches and more!
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Quacks Podcast! retweeted
Graham 🌠 @ggoreart
In honour of the merch dropping, here’s a comparison between the concept art for @quackspod and the final logo
[image description: on the left is the concept art - Harry dressed as a plague doctor (holding, rather than wearing his mask) and Silna dressed as a modern doctor against a red backdrop printed with tiny caduceuses with a banner reading ‘Quacks: Old Medicine for the Modern Age’ along the bottom - and the right is the official logo - a yellow rubber duck wearing a headlamp and a lab coat against a simple red background and the same banner]|
Harry D.S. Goodsir @GoodsirPhD
@ggoreart a tragedy that we didn’t go with the original logo and expose my long history of cosplaying plague doctors
[image description: four photos of Harry dressed as a plague doctor much like the original art, ages 9, 14, 17 & 23]
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EPISODE 69 - AN ABSOLUTE SNACC
SILNA: if we learned anything from our mummies episode it's that people really, really wanted more cannibalism talk.
HARRY: I'm a little bit concerned, actually.
SILNA: I think they just wanted to know if we'd eat each other if we had to.
HARRY: specifically each other?
SILNA: yeah I think so, that’s a pretty good test of a relationship.
HARRY: well, why beat around the bush, if we were in a life-or-death situation and it really came down to it, would you eat me to survive or let me eat you to survive?
SILNA: okay. That really depends on the circumstances. I don’t know if I could handle the emotional toll of eating you specifically but I think if driven to the extremes I could consume human flesh, provided that the person died of natural causes and wasn't anybody I knew. I wouldn’t kill someone just to eat them. I wouldn’t kill someone in general. And I’d rather be eaten than eat someone else, I think. You can’t have moral issues about partaking in cannibalism if you’re already dead.
HARRY: I’d also much rather be eaten if it meant that someone else had a shot at surviving. And I agree on the ‘not murdering someone just for food’ issue. If you were dying and you gave me permission to eat you I’d feel a little better than, say, if you dropped dead spontaneously and I’d have to wrestle with whether or not I could live having eaten you.
SILNA: you do know, hypothetically at least, what parts are safest to eat.
HARRY: I’m realizing now that my idea of describing in clinical detail what parts of the body can be eaten as a way of dissuading people from cannibalism due to sheer gross-out factor is probably not smart on the off chance that someone actually goes ahead and takes my advice.
SILNA: give most of the details but change one thing.
HARRY: like how in Fight Club the writers had to change an ingredient for napalm because it’s alarmingly easy to make napalm.
SILNA: I’ve never seen Fight Club. You know this.
HARRY: maybe our listeners have! I’m not judging their taste in movies.
SILNA: well, I am.
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LADY SILENCE: SILNA GOODSIR OPENS UP ABOUT HER PLATFORM, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND WHY QUACKS HAD TO BE A TWO-PERSON JOB
By Sophia Cracroft
Dr. Silna Goodsir meets me outside the Unikkaarvik Visitor Centre with two cups of coffee and a smile. We’d discussed this beforehand, the coffee, the itinerary, the avenues of conversation. Having learned it would be my first visit to Nunavut (and Canada as a whole), she wanted to make sure I’d see everything Iqaluit has to offer. Hence the Visitor Centre. We’re standing in front of a large, and rather ferocious-looking diorama of a polar bear when she drops two bombshells on me: the first that polar bears can outpace a horse—only for short distances, she reassures me when I look frightened—and, that having a podcast was never something she thought she could do.
“I didn’t speak until I was four,” she explains, not breaking eye contact with the bear in front of her ”and until I was 19 I was largely non-verbal. My father took me to speech therapists, and I learned to sign which made things easier, but we never quite figured out why I didn’t talk. Maybe I didn’t feel the need to, maybe I didn’t think I had anything worth saying. The kids at school called me ‘Lady Silence’ because of this. That probably didn’t help, all things considered. I suppose sometimes I’m worried I’ll just...stop, that I’ll run out of words. I’ve been trying to make up for 15 years of varying verbality because it feels like I’ve got words blocked up inside me, but I worry that maybe there are too many and I'll never be able to let all of them breathe”.
[...]
We stop at Big Racks Barbecue for lunch. Along the walk, because you can walk almost everywhere in Iqaluit I’m assured; and it isn’t hard to believe considering the low-population-to-area ratio, she gestures vaguely in the direction of the movie theatre where she worked to fund her way through med school—the Astro Theatre, Iqaluit’s only cinema, is unfortunately closed at the time of publishing—and the address of the visitor’s centre we just exited: 220 Silnaa
“Quacks was always going to be the two of us,” she tells me in between adding vinegar to her fries, and after warmly greeting all the staff (‘this is Sophia!’ she introduces me warmly, as though we have been friends for years ‘she’s visiting from London!’. She does not mention that my purpose for visiting is to profile her for a magazine, it’s somewhat comforting to know she sees me as a person before a journalist. When I tell her this she simply laughs before telling me that we’re ‘people, first and foremost’). “I wasn’t sure of it at first, I thought it would be better listening, more atmospheric if it was just Harry talking about medical history. But he convinced me to do it. ‘It’ll sound better if we’re together, I work better with you’!” When she repeats her husband’s words it’s with an imitation Scottish burr, clearly honed from years of practice.
He was right, the original conception of Quacks, Harry Goodsir sharing pieces of medical history with a tight script, would have stood fine on its own, but with the easy repertoire and experience the Doctors Goodsir have built up, it’s electric. “It’s almost healing, to be doing Quacks. That might be a silly thing to say, last episode we had a 7-minute tangent debating whether Creature from the Black Lagoon is a romantic comedy, but it’s true. It feels good to be doing this show. It feels good that people want to hear what I have to say.”
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EPISODE 76 - AAAAARGH MY LEG
HARRY: is that...chewing?
SILNA: oh my god is he eating plastic again? Is the fancy diet food not enough?
HARRY: I'm going to check. [pushes chair back, talking and faint animal sounds audible in the background]
SILNA: esteemed guests, Tuunbaq has started this new routine where whenever he decides it's time to get up, he hops up onto the bed and stands over me, puts his paws on either side of my shoulders, and drools on my face until I wake up. Tuunbaq runs this household. Tuunbaq would run Canada if given the chance.
HARRY: [distant] let me look inside your mouth!
TUUNBAQ: [yowls]
SILNA he can open doors. He's unstoppable.
HARRY: okay, I'm back. He was not eating plastic, he was just gnawing at the side of his bowl.
SILNA: no gods no kings no masters, only Tuunbaq.
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Silna (the cooler) Goodsir @GoodsirMD
There are five (5) distressed babies on this flight and I can't stop thinking about how doctors would prescribe morphine, laudanum, and opium to get babies to stop crying|
I'm not advocating for bringing it back!! I just think it's wild. "Give your baby cocaine" a 1840s doctor would say "they'll sleep so well you'd think they were dead!"
|
"What's an airplane?" they would also probably say. "why are you hurtling across the ocean in a metal death tube?” “How does someone like you have a medical license?"
|
Spotted: @GoodsirPhD crying at the end of third Transformers movie??
[image description: a tired-looking but nonetheless cozy Harry Goodsir staring dead-eyed at the screen in front of him with visible tear tracks down his cheeks]
Harry D.S. Goodsir @GoodsirPhD
Spotted: @GoodsirMD also crying at the end of the third Transformers movie
[image description: a somewhat bitter Silna Goodsir, holding a plastic cup of orange juice in one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. The credits for Transformers: Dark of the Moon clearly visible in the background]
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EPISODE 88 - Goodsir 7
SILNA: fair warning, this episode might be a mess.
HARRY: fair warning, this episode will definitely be a mess.
ROBERT GOODSIR: well that isn’t very nice.
JANE GOODSIR: it’s probably true though.
HARRY: as I was saying, this episode will definitely be a mess because we have five special guests today. Do you want to go around and introduce yourselves?
ARCHIE GOODSIR: which way you should we start? Clockwise or anticlockwise?
HARRY: either, I suppose.
ROBERT: I’m Robert Goodsir.
JANE: I’m Jane Goodsir, I’m a botanist.
ROBERT: shit I forgot to list my credentials.
ARCHIE: you’ve lost your chance, buddy. I’m Archie Goodsir, I’m just a lowly med student.
JOHN GOODSIR: I’m John Goodsir, I’m an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh.
JOSEPH GOODSIR: I’m Joseph Goodsir and I am...not a doctor.
JANE: we love you anyway.
ROBERT: our dad, two of our uncles, and our grandfather were also doctors.
SILNA: I swear none of this is made up. Harry does indeed come from a medical dynasty.
HARRY: now, Silna’s an only child, so she never got the experience of being zipped into a sleeping bag and swung around by your ankles-
SILNA: what!
HARRY: or buried neck-deep in a bog-
SILNA: no!
HARRY: or general sibling shenanigans.
SILNA: where were your parents, why were you all just feral and running around Scotland?
JOHN: dad thought it would be “a learning experience”.
HARRY: basically, we’re going to go around and share wild things we did as children and contemplate how we aren’t dead.
ARCHIE: can I start? When I was 9, Bobby put me in a tire and rolled me down a hill into a river.
🦴🦴🦴
Harry D.S. Goodsir @GoodsirPhD
Seated and waiting for @janegoodsir to give her Big Plant Speech at @BotSocScot !!
Silna (the cooler) Goodsir @GoodsirMD
@janegoodsir got a MEDAL for PLANTS!!
[image description: Jane, Harry & Silna all fancily dressed and huddled in a dark-lit selfie. Jane is holding a velvet box propped open to reveal a glimmering gold medal]
Harry D.S. Goodsir @Goodsir PhD
The Dr. Goodsir Extended Universe
[image description: Silna, Jane, Robert, John, Archie & Joseph Goodsir all sitting around a table playing some sort of card game. It’s unclear who, if anyone is winning]|
Statistically, at least half of all doctors in Edinburgh are Goodsirs
|
Joey (far right, blue hat) isn’t a doctor and he’d want you all to know that he’s “shirking the family legacy” and also that we’re very proud of him
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EPISODE 94 - TYPHOID SCARY
SILNA: Do you ever think about the number of diseases that are transferred by people simply not washing their hands after using the toilet?
HARRY: every day of my life.
SILNA: people are out there walking around with poop hands trying to give us typhoid. Apparently, it’s rude to use hand sanitizer after shaking hands with a bunch of people you’ve only just met, as I learned this past weekend at a conference.
HARRY: you don’t know those people! You don’t know where their hands have or have not been, whipping out hand sanitizer is perfectly within your rights.
SILNA: it...isn’t hard to wash your hands. And I truly don’t mean to come off as rude, but I’m a doctor, and I know the statistics about cis men and general hygiene. They’re grim. I’d like to shake hands with you, not your penis, or someone else's penis, thank you very much.
HARRY: listen, I don’t care if you 'didn't touch it’, you’re still in an unsanitary communal environment. Washing your hands takes all of a minute and it ensures that you don’t walk around with poop hands and give everyone typhoid.
SILNA: wash your [bleep] hands.
HARRY: wash your [bleep] hands!
🦴🦴🦴
Quacks Podcast! @Quackspod
It’s coming up to our 100th episode, imagine! In honour of this (frankly ridiculous) milestone, please enjoy these larval pictures from 2007. Yes, we’ve both always been like this.
[Image descriptions: two pictures, both with appropriately 2007 quality. The first is of Silna wearing the polo shirt and visor of an overworked movie theatre employee, along with a snazzy pair of sunglasses. She’s holding an electric blue slushie and is flashing a peace sign with the other hand. The second picture is of Harry, bushy-haired and moderately dishevelled, standing in a body of water with his pants rolled up to his knees and a shirt that says ‘I have crabs’ above a crab graphic. True to form, he is holding a necora puber or, velvet crab, and is smiling broadly at the camera]
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EPISODE 100 - THE FIRST ANNUAL QUACKS Q&A SPECIAL
SILNA: Vé wants to know “what kind of animal is Tuunbaq, exactly? He sounds like some sort of unholy demon, and every picture you post of him is cryptid-levels of blurry. Is he a dog? A cat? A small bear? An ancient and powerful spirit? Also, I love the show so much, thank you for creating it! ”
HARRY: thank you!
SILNA: that is a very serendipitous question, Vé, because Tuunbaq happens to be in the studio with us.
HARRY: ‘in the studio’ she says. We record this at our kitchen table and Tuunbaq is trying to open a cabinet door.
SILNA: he’s very good at opening doors, very talented. But to answer your question: Tuunbaq is an experience
HARRY: he’s a cat.
SILNA: a two-foot-long cat. We have no idea why he’s so big, he was the runt of the litter.
HARRY: he nearly fought a caribou once.
SILNA: I’m so proud of him. My massive, monstrous boy. He doesn’t really meow, mostly he just screams.
HARRY: that’s relatable.
SILNA: yeah. Ace wants to know if your full name is actually ‘Harry Nintendo DS Goodsir’.
HARRY: I wish.
SILNA: if you change your actual, legal name to Harry Nintendo DS Goodsir I am going to divorce you.
HARRY: that’s fair, honestly. This last question is from...we cannot read this on air.
SILNA: we can if we censor it, and we have to.
HARRY: why?
SILNA: because I need to call out the person who sent it. This next question is from ‘E.C.’ aka Twitter user @EliusCorn and it reads “ if scurvy can be cured by vitamin c, and semen contains vitamin c, how much” uh, what’s the least graphic way of wording this?
HARRY: I don’t think there is one.
SILNA: "how much oral sex would I have to perform to cure scurvy ?”
HARRY: a lot. I don’t have time to do the math right now, nor do I particularly want to consider the logistics of that question, ever, but it’s not a viable scurvy treatment method.
SILNA: I understand that this question is almost certainly a joke, but E.C. please do not. Just ...please don’t.
HARRY: you’d die.
SILNA: would you consider that….
HARRY: I beg you to not
SILNA: going out with a bang?
[Muffled background laugher]
Anyway, that’s it for us this episode. Thank you for sticking with us, please don’t send us questions about semen reversing the effects of scurvy, and we hope to keep going with this podcast for as long as you’ll allow it! As usual, you can find us on Twitter @quackspod or at our website quackspodcast.com. Our personal Twitters are @GoodsirMD and @GoodsirPhD. Our beautiful logo is by Graham Gore, and our theme music is by me. Thank you, we love you, make good choices!
HARRY: imagine that!
TUUNBAQ: [unholy screeching]
[EXIT MUSIC PLAYS]
